Bücher der Reihe Elements in Public and Nonprofit Administration

We undertake the first quantitative and broadly comparative study of the structure and performance of partnership communities to our knowledge. Our study addresses several important research questions. How connected are the members of partnership communities? How can we understand the quality of the projects a community undertakes? How do political institutions shape their structure and performance? After defining partnership communities as networked communities of private firms which form the consortia that enter into long-term contractual arrangements with governments, we show how they are affected by government demand for partners. We then provide an overview of those factors predicting success in financing projects. Finally, we focus on the political economy of partnership communities. We develop and test theoretical predictions about how national institutions shape partnership communities and the quality of projects. We also investigate voters' preferences over alternative arrangements of infrastructure delivery before drawing out implications for research and practice.

Public service innovation, defined as the adoption of new technology and methods of service delivery, is at the heart of public management research. Scholars have long studied public and private sector innovation as distinctive phenomena, arguing that private sector innovation aims to increase firms' competitive advantage, while public sector innovation purports to improve governance and performance. The public-private dichotomy overlooks the complex way how organizations interact with each other for service delivery. Public services are increasingly delivered through the web of collaborative networks, in which organizations compete and cooperate simultaneously. This Element explores how coopetition, namely the simultaneous presence of competition and collaboration, shapes innovation in the health care sector. Analyzing panel data of 4,000+ American hospitals from 2008 to 2017, this Element finds evidence that coopetition catalyzes the technology and service process innovation and offers practical implications on managing innovation in competitive environments.

As the US faced its lowest levels of reported trust in government, the COVID-19 crisis revealed the essential service that various federal agencies provide as sources of information. This Element explores variations in trust across various levels of government and government agencies based on a nationally-representative survey conducted in March of 2020. First, it examines trust in agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, state health departments, and local health care providers. This includes variation across key characteristics including party identification, age, and race. Second, the Element explores the evolution of trust in health-related organizations throughout 2020 as the pandemic continued. The Element concludes with a discussion of the implications for agency-specific assessments of trust and their importance as we address historically low levels of trust in government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element is about the challenges of working collaboratively in and with governments in countries with a strong New Public Management (NPM) influence. As the evidence from New Zealand analyzed in this study demonstrates, collaboration - working across organization boundaries and with the public - was not inherently a part of the NPM and was often discouraged or ignored. When the need for collaborative public management approaches became obvious, efforts centered around "e;retrofitting"e; collaboration into the NPM, with mixed results. This Element analyzes the impediments and catalysts to collaboration in strong NPM governments and concludes that significant modification of the standard NPM operational model is needed including: Alternative institutions for funding, design, delivery, monitoring and accountability; New performance indicators; Incentives and rewards for collaboration; Training public servants in collaboration; Collaboration champions, guardians, complexity translators, and stewards; and paradoxically, NPM governance processes designed to make collaborative decisions stick.

This Element explores Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its potential application to the field of public administration. It proposes specific areas within the field where a CRT framework would help to uncover and rectify structural and institutional racism. This is paramount given the high priority that the field places on social equity, the third pillar of public administration. If there is a desire to achieve social equity and justice, systematic, structural racism needs to be addressed and confronted directly. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is one example of the urgency and significance of applying theories from a variety of disciplines to the study of racism in public administration.

This project offers a new leadership framework for the next generation of nonprofit professionals. Based on five years of data collected from the New York Community Trust Leadership Fellowship - designed to address leadership development gaps in the nonprofit sector - it constructs three dimensions and eleven themes for the theory and practice of leadership standpoints. Leadership standpoints is a framework for practicing inclusion, building spaces for performance, and thinking and acting with range. Those using leadership standpoints continuously interact with diverse stakeholders, constantly verifying others' views and interests, remaining keenly attentive to power distributions, material constraints, and hidden or unacknowledged voices that need surfaced, while expanding their personal and social outlooks to elevate performance and meet pressing demands best addressed through broadly informed decisions. I provide an overview of leadership standpoints as an aspirational, democratic, grounded form of leadership within everyone's reach.

After the 2016 election upheaval and polarized public discourse in the United States and the rise of radical-right and populist parties across the globe, a new phenomenon in online charitable giving has emerged - donating motivated by rage. This Element defines this phenomenon, discusses its meaning amidst the current body of research and knowledge on emotions and charitable giving, the implications of viral fundraising and increased social media use by both donors and nonprofit organizations, the intersectionality of rage giving and its meaning for practitioners and nonprofit organizations, the understanding of giving as a form of civic engagement, and the exploration of philanthropy as a tool for social movements and social change. Previous research shows contextual variation in charitable giving motivations; however, giving motivated by feelings of anger and rage is an unstudied behavioral shift in online giving.

This Element introduces the concepts of "shared measures" and "collective data use" to add collaborative, relational elements to existing performance management theory. It draws on a case study of collaboratives in North Carolina that were established to develop community responses to the opioid epidemic.

Accountability is a staple of Public Administration scholarship, but scholars have been unsuccessful at developing a predictive model of accountable behavior. In this Element, we seek to further a predictive model of accountability by understanding the norms and expectations associated with the implementation of Body-Worn Cameras.

Exploring efforts to integrate women into combat forces in the military, we investigate how resistance to equity becomes entrenched, ultimately excluding women from being full participants in the workplace. Based on focus groups and surveys with members of Special Operations, we found most of the resistance is rooted in traditional gender stereotypes that are often bolstered through organizational policies and practices. The subtlety of these practices often renders them invisible. We refer to this invisibility as organizational obliviousness. Obliviousness exists at the individual level, it becomes reinforced at the cultural level, and, in turn, cultural practices are entrenched institutionally by policies. Organizational obliviousness may not be malicious or done to actively exclude or harm, but the end result is that it does both. Throughout this Element we trace the ways that organizational obliviousness shapes individuals, culture, and institutional practices throughout the organization.

What motivates public employees to work hard? This Element systematically reviews answers from public administration research. The authors locate this research in a novel two-dimensional typology, which shows that public employees can be motivated for other- and self-interested reasons and extrinsic (motivated by outcomes) and intrinsic (motivated by work itself) reasons. Public administration research sheds significant light on extrinsic motivators: working hard to help society (public service motivation), one's organization (organizational commitment) and oneself (financial incentives). Future research should focus on hitherto understudied motivators: symbolic rewards and intrinsic motivators, such as enjoyable work tasks, warm glow, and relatedness with colleagues. Supplementary material for this Element is available online.